Kali Linux, Successor of the BackTrack Penetration Testing Distro, Launched

mask.of.sanity writes "Kali, the sixth installment of the BackTrack operating system has been launched. The platform is a favorite of hackers and penetration testers and has been entirely rebuilt to become more secure, transparent and customizable. Metasploit too has been rebuilt to be more stable with an optional noob-friendly interface. Kali even works on ARM devices and comes ready to go for your Raspberry Pi." The big new feature is that it's been repackaged as a flavor of Debian, instead of using their own custom packaging magic.

Re:Its a great project but...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"One thing that I have never understood is why is Backtrack/Kali a distro in the first place. Why not just release a set of packages with a meta package to require the others if you chose deb, or rpm, if you want to run on Ubuntu/Debian/RH/Centos or as like a Slackware diskset with tag files if you go that way?"

Because they need a fully customized configuration with complete control over so many things in order for them to work properly. The kernel has to be configured "just so" or packages will not work. The network interfaces default to disabled at boot time. Almost everything needs root privileges to run. The goals for a secure server or desktop OS and Kali are so radically divergent that it makes absolutely no sense to try to mix the two.

Re:Why?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Can someone please explain to me why one would use this distro instead of just installing packages with Debian? I've never understood the appeal"

See the reply to a similar question further up.

The short answer is: because all the privileges and configs have been pre-set-up so everything just works. You would have to do an awful lot of diddling a standard *nix distro in order to do the same thing. This way, you just install. Somebody else has already done the (considerable amount of) work.